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Architecture as counter hegemonic practice: Political Theory and Architecture in Conversation

By Aya Nassar

Academics
and theoreticians in both fields of architecture as well as politics might have
been in a continuous struggle with whether or not architecture and politics are
related, and if so what would this entail (though it has to be said some do
this more and/or better than others). What does a political architecture mean?
What kind of architecture for what kind of politics? Is politicization a
perversion of the architectural profession? These and more questions were posed
in the December Architectural Exchange held by the AA school of Architecture. The
Architecture Exchange is one of the platforms where intellectual conversation
can happen between architecture and other fields. This time the exchange
brought four architectural figures to answer the question “How is architecture
political. The discussion was in engagement with political theorist Chantal
Mouffe and her work. As the
organizers noted: political theory has always thought in spatial terms, and
architecture has always thought in political terms, which indicates that the
two fields have always been thinking of each other.

“While consensus is necessary, it must be accompanied by dissent”

Mouffe

Chantal
Mouffe’s work is among the most influential in contemporary political theory. She
is best known for her work with Ernesto Laclau on Hegemony: the practice of establishing
order, which is temporary, precarious articulation and always contingent and
most importantly should not be understood as outside power relations. She also
has her position in some of the most fundamental discussions in political
theory, nothing less than the meaning of the political itself, and the nature
of the public sphere.

Her position stems from an argument for the
necessity of antagonism in democratic politics as an alternative for much of
political theory’s emphasis on consensus. For her, in democratic societies
conflict cannot and will not be eradicated, and the aim of democratic
institutions should not be to eradicate or solve antagonism, but to transform
these antagonisms (struggles between enemies) into “agonism” (struggle between
adversaries). Thus, her work on public sphere distances itself from the more
common associational version of understanding politics, which emphasizes
harmony and believes in the possibility of political consensus. This emphasis
on generating consensus at the center generates a post-political condition,
that is, creates a condition where contesting the hegemonic order becomes
increasingly difficult. Therefore, she places herself in the dissociative
approach, one that sees that antagonism and conflict as irreducible, but that
in the same time doesn’t negate the possibility of plural, democratic politics.

The
four presentations were primarily an architectural engagement with Mouffe’s understanding
of “the political”; nevertheless other imaginations of the political were also present.
“The political” is the ontological category, which defines and is constantly
redefined by political theory, and therefore any serious conversation with the
discipline is bound to find itself in processes of politicizing what is generally
undertsood as apolitical, and/or depoliticize what is political.

For example, Reinhold Martin’s presentation, aimed to achieve two steps,
the first is to identify the contemporary hegemonic order, and the second to
present a trajectory of the meaning of public space. The first task is in
alignment with Mouffe’s terms, but the second depended on Arendt’s definition
of the political. Arendt makes a necessary opposition between the Polis/the
political and the Oikus (housekeeping)/the social. Her definition is the
paradigmatic ideal of political space, as the Agora, as a space of appearance
of plurality. Politics is threatened when the polis is managed as an
Oikus/household, which has classically been the space for production and
governed despotically.

Martin’s
aim is to understand the hegemonic aspects of the modern polis, where politics
is located in the spaces of production (Marx), and where the public space
disperses as the city becomes a “factory without walls” with the abolishment of divisions between
work, leisure and home (Negri). It is
nevertheless exactly locating the polis in housekeeping that Martin invites us
to interrogate further. Housing is the privileged site where architects go to
feel politically responsible, and it is also where the state mitigates and
brings together different agents in the interest of capital. But more than
that, he points out to the inherently political character of the house itself, the space in which agon repeats daily, and where the struggle for the polis is
waged.

Ines Weizman
chose to narrow the political into acts of dissidence in the former Soviet Union.
Specifically acts of antagonism on part of the architects who without a shared
ideology or party try to contest the way subjects are governed without seeking
to capture power or assume a final moment of liberation. This raised the
question of which political theory for which politics, since Chantal Mouffe saw
her work only applicable to plural democratic politics that risk the death of
politics through too much consensus on the center, while for her, struggles in
the former USSR, or in Egypt (2011) were a totally different kind of politics.

Weizman’s lecture was also about imagination
of autonomous space. She brought examples of architectural competition entries
in formal exhibition, architectural proposals, for example Mikhail Flippov’s
watercolor renderings in proposal to reconstruct the church of Christ the
Savior in Moscow, (which can be found here
along with some other of his paintings), and underground installations that had
no formal records. These served to show how dissidents imagined space in
reaction to the spatial and temporal disruption of Moscow as a historical city.

In Weizman’s lecture, the question moved
further to become about the agency of the architect to act politically rather
than about architecture per se. Architects seem to be condemned into working
with people with power, land and money in a way that suggests that architecture
is least likely to produce dissidence (a point made by Aureli and Whiting
later), yet there is an ambivalent role between conformity and resistance. The
architect’s dissidence can get camouflaged in architectural technical language
to produce gestures of refusal and thus architecture becomes one of the
precarious practices and messages in field of antagonism.

Pier
Vittorio Aureli somehow got
closer to pinpointing this paradox. Architecture is always political yet it
cannot be political. Architecture is an
ideology that represent consensus, and is implicated in neutralizing and
depoliticizing the city. This is when it is understood as a profession, with
its division of labor, and with its own presentation in the public sphere, and
foremost in some of its classic texts.

At
the heart of the paradox he presented is how the profession chooses to deal
with conflict. Aureli, brought the two examples of Vitruvius’ classic Ten
books on Architecture; the
oldest theory on how cities should be organized as a coherent body, and le
Corbusier’s “Architecture où revolution”, and his “La guerre? Mieux vaut
construire” (War? Better to build) in PLANS 6(1931) as examples where design
and building replaces politics, and where the objective is to pacify, stabilize
and avoid conflict.

On
the other hand architecture is always political since any architectural form
always implies a subject, a mode of life, and of being in space and therefore
it implies an idea of the political and informs a spatial condition by always
framing space. Architecture could be a practice that aims to construct
political antagonism in the city, rather than mask it, and to represent agnostic claims to the city rather than presenting architecture as the
solution to a problem. (Ex: the Red
Vienna social housing project)

Thus
there is no death of politics; architecture is always political especially when
it pretends to be non-political, and it can be political through the architect
as a producer who is also able to modify the precarious conditions in which
architecture is produced. Sarah Whiting picked up from where Aureli to ponder more on the architectural
practice, as one demanding extreme expertise and extreme genaralism, as a
temporality that demands patience. Such
a status is a given that makes architecture political but also where it becomes
difficult for the architect to act politically. As patrons stop endorsing, and
architects move to artistic installations, to writing or to transform their
technical expertise to capital, and the practice understood as building becomes
increasingly disadvantaged.

Mouffe,
in her responses to her interlocutors, brought back the conversation from the
architect to understanding and locating the political. It didn't make sense to
her to say political architecture, since architecture is always a part of
hegemonic construction, hence always political. The world is constituted
through a multiplicity of discourses that establish a common sense, which in
turn becomes neutralized and establish the realm of what is possible and what
we can expect. Architectural practice, like any other practice can be
implicated in the construction, maintenance, and the transformation of
hegemony. Therefore, for her ‘critical architecture’ is what the presenters had
been calling ‘political’ through their presentations. And the question thus
becomes how to envisage a critical architecture?

A
critical practice would depend on how it contributes to the counter hegemonic
practices, specifically how we envisage challenging the neoliberal order. Critique
is never purely a movement of negation; there are always moments of dis-articulation and re-articulation, and there will always be the day after the
revolution question. For the architectural practice thus to be critical, it
would have to engage in a strategic war of positions and create a multiplicity
of agnostic spaces in which hegemony can be contested.

Despite
Mouffe’s uneasiness about using her mode of analysis for politics that is not
democratic, one can not help but pose question about the elsewhere. I am here
neither making the argument for politicizing architecture or de-politicizing a
practice that have become political in many sorts of ways. I do find the two
positions potentially reductive if the particular question of: which
understanding of “the political” for which kind of politics and architecture is
not posed. A lot of cross disciplinary conversations have been happening in and
about Cairo over the past four or five years, perhaps this blog is one sign of
that. Yet, amidst the sweeping and paradoxical tendencies of politicization and
depoliticization of public sphere we have been part of, political theorists
have not posed that basic question sufficiently enough to engage in that
particular conversation.

Aya Nassar is an Mphil/Phd student at the Politics and International Studies Department at Warwick, and a Teaching assistant in Cairo University. Her research looks into Space and Politics in Cairo. Other research interests include urban studies, public space, memory and nostalgia, politics and literature, political theory (Arendt, Lefebvre, Foucault).